Donald Trump was dogged by the false allegations made in the Christopher Steele dossier throughout his presidency. The media obsessed about it. Adam Schiff kept on claiming that it was true. A Special Counsel investigation was initiated. Impeachment followed.

And after years of this the Mueller Report showed it to be totally bogus. It was prepared and paid for by the Clinton campaign, and the complicit FBI ran with it for the sole purpose of smearing and crippling Donald Trump.

Now, in a bombshell report, CNN revealed that the FBI knew with complete certainty that it was all crap. After examining it the FBI offered the author of the Dossier Christopher Steele $1 million if he could substantiate the allegations.

They never paid him, of course, because it was made up from beginning to end.

Shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI offered retired British spy Christopher Steele “up to $1 million” to prove the explosive allegations in his dossier about Donald Trump, a senior FBI analyst testified Tuesday.

The cash offer was made during an October 2016 meeting between Steele and several top FBI officials who were trying to corroborate Steele’s claims that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to win the election.

FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten testified that Steele never got the money because he could not “prove the allegations.”

You would think that $1 million would be a nice incentive to come up with the goods, wouldn’t you?

Yet the FBI actually conducted an investigation, leaked to the media, briefed both Obama and Trump as if there was substance to a piece of fiction that they knew without doubt was ridiculous and insupportable.

Auten also said Steele refused to provide the names of any of his sources during that meeting, and that Steele didn’t give the FBI anything during that meeting that corroborated the claims in his explosive dossier.

Auten was testifying at the criminal trial of Igor Danchenko, a primary source for Steele’s dossier, who is being prosecuted by special counsel John Durham. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty to lying to the FBI.

CNN previously reported that the FBI reimbursed some expenses for Steele, who had been an FBI informant.

Durham, a Trump-era prosecutor who is looking for misconduct in the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, has used some of the proceedings Tuesday to criticize the FBI’s handling of some of the early steps in the Russia probe. Durham handled many of the in-court arguments on Tuesday and personally questioned Auten on the witness stand – a rare move for a special counsel and former US attorney.

The dossier contained unverified allegations about Trump’s connections to Russia, including his alleged business dealings, rumors of lurid trysts in Moscow and claims that his campaign collaborated with the Kremlin in 2016. Trump vehemently denied the claims, and Steele’s work has lost a significant amount of credibility over the years. Today, the dossier is largely seen as an unproven collection of rumors and gossip.

Of course all the worst actors in this drama are not only going to get off scott free, they are thriving precisely because they abused their power and credibility in order to destroy public enemy #1 for the Establishment: Donald Trump. They are CNN and MSNBC analysts, trusted advisors, and heroes to the Left. They are making bank for being the worst kind of fraudsters, bordering on traitors.

Millions of Americans not only were misled by people who embodied the public trust, millions still believe what they were told.

If this isn’t a direct attack on American democracy by the very people entrusted to preserve it, what would be?